Brooks

Possibly The End (of this journal)

brooksmoses — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 02:26:32 GMT

The end of the decade seems like a good time to close chapters that have been left open and forgotten, and this LiveJournal seems like one of those.

On March 5th, 2002, I wrote: "So I seem to have a LiveJournal. Whee! I should go do work now, rather than spending an hour customizing it. :)" I did go do work, rather a lot in the past 17 years, and also a lot of LiveJournal customizing, and lots of posting too.

However, I haven't checked my "reading" page here in years, I think. I meant to, and did for a while, but like many things, the habit faded away. Meanwhile, automated crossposting from Dreamwidth is broken, and it seems unclear if that's a temporary or permanent issue.

At this point, I'm going to trim down my friendslist here to just the people that don't crosspost to Dreamwidth, and probably stop crossposting. (If you have a Dreamwidth account and aren't on my access list there, please let me know!) Life goes on, just elsewhere, and you can probably always email me at dpdx.net to get in touch.

So long, and thank you all for everything. This may be The End of this journal, but the book between these covers was an excellent and lovely piece of my life.

Creating a will for your Gmail account

brooksmoses — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 22:26:11 GMT

Today I learned: You can set up instructions for what should happen to your Gmail account (and other Google accounts) in the event of extended inactivity. Doing this while you are alive is substantially easier than the process that your next of kin would have to go through to get access to the account in order to find all the loose ends to tie up in the event that you're no longer alive.

More info here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

A YouTube wander (and some music recommendations)

brooksmoses — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 08:12:41 GMT

Last night I went on a YouTube walkabout, as one does, and came across rather a good bit of music I liked that needs some more sharing.

I started with a recommendation from someone on Gallus Rostromegalus's Discord, for Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq's "I've No More F***s to Give. He's an exceedingly dapper gentleman with a banjo/ukelele-cross, and the song is exactly the sort of cheerfully profane folk song that you would expect from the title. Amusingly, there's also a family-friendly version where the profanity is replaced with increasingly-absurd sound effects.

This is rather long, so you probably want a cut-tag....

Wild also has some other songs I liked -- a cover of Dolly Parton's "9 to 5", a cover of Flanders and Swann's "The Hippopotamus Song" (and may I just say that I am appreciative of the juxtaposition of those two), and an original, "Living in Sin". Unfortunately, his recording setup sounds like it could use a bit of improvement.

I didn't really find too much of note in the recommendations there, but I was in the mood for more music, so I found a couple of things I hadn't listened to on Rob Landes's channel. Landes is a violinist who seems to have concluded that doing entertaining YouTube videos is a better gig than traditional violinist jobs, and does things like short bits of music from 100 different video games in chronological order, with costumes.

On some of his recent videos, Landes has been collaborating with Lynn Jones on electric guitar, and he had a link to her channel, so I went to see what else she had.

She has a number of things, but one of the things I really liked is her acoustic covers of classic rock and metal. Her cover of AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" is good, her cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" is even better (her rendition of the the intro yell is amazing), and I am completely in love with her cover of Ozzy Osborne's "Crazy Train". That's one of the sorts of covers that shows off things in the original song that I hadn't realized were there, and I'll come back to it a bit later.

From there I wandered in the direction of more metal, by way of thinking of other covers to suggest (since Jones was asking for suggestions). There was a brief divergence into covers of The Mountain Goats' "Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton," (link goes to some songwriter commentary) of which I think the one by Nathaniel Rateliff is perhaps the definitive one. IIRC, it's from an NPR vidcast that had bands choosing from a list of other bands to do a cover of, with the intended result of bands doing things rather different from their usual. Rateliff was really pleased to have the opportunity to do it, as he is really fond of the song. I also found Laura Jane Grace's cover of it, which is biting and fierce in a "trans woman putting emotions of personal experience into the 'When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you' lyric" sort of way. And I also found this bedroom-recorded cover by a couple of young teenagers posting as "Depression Session TM" which ... yeah, that's who the song is for. They're pretty good, too -- see also this cover of "Hallelujah".

Speaking of trans women singers, there's an absolutely excellent song by Axis of Awesome (I'd heard their "The Four Chords Song" from a decade ago but nothing else) about one of the band members transitioning: "The Elephant in the Room". It is amazing and lovely and subverts expectations for layers.

So, actual metal, which "Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton" is not. I discovered Charlie Parra del Riego's Symphonic Metal playlist, which at many times would be exactly the sort of thing I'd want, but it wasn't doing it for me at the time, so I set it aside for later.

Instead, I ended up on Leo Moracchioli's "Frog Leap Studios" channel", looking at his set of "covers you didn't know you wanted", several of which are collaborations with other artists many of whom don't normally do metal. A YouTube recommendation of this cover of "Sultans of Swing" with Mary Spender is how I got there, and it's clear that the two of them are having lots of fun. Spender's channel is also full of good stuff, and I found several other good channels this way: This cover of Toto's "Africa" led me to Hannah Boulton and Rabea Massaad, and this cover of "Eye of the Tiger" led me to Rob Lundgren, who is an amazing vocalist doing mostly metal (but also other things), who has good original songs and also fun with things like Can You Feel the Love Tonight (which makes me want to hear him doing more Disney songs as metal covers, because the emotionality translates surprisingly well).

Moracchioli also has lots of solo covers; here's "The Safety Dance", which always makes me think of teinedreugan and suzannekmoses.

On a separate thread of following links, I found myself wandering back to Lynn Jones's excellent acoustic "Crazy Train" cover, and looking at the lyrics, and noticing that she'd shortened it by a couple of verses and wanting to hear some other acoustic takes on it. The first one I found is this guitar version by Stacey Terry, which is also lovely even though it's decade-old home-recording quality. The emotionality of this rendition is just about perfect, and it works so well as a gentle folk ballad.

(More of Terry's work: this delightfully joyful cover of Johnny Cash's "I Was There When It Happened", and also this cover of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads".)

In the description, Terry references a cover by Emm Gryner, which I tracked down -- YouTube copy here; it's piano and vocals). It's a much more professional recording, and I like it quite a lot (and it does a lot of lovely things with the dynamic range of piano music), but I kind of like Terry's simpler version of lyrics even better for this particular song. So now I have another artist to look up. Here's one of Gryner's original pieces, "Blackwinged Bird". When I was looking up this cover, I also found this piano-only cover of Gryner's version by Ernie Powell, which deserves far more than its 32 views and 6 likes.

Somewhere from there, I saw a YouTube recommendation for this "Vocal coach reacts to Disturbed's 'The Sound of Silence" from Ken Tamplin, which sounded interesting -- and it was; he goes through a lot of the things David Draiman is doing with his voice in the song in a pleasant geeking-out sort of way. It's also a really interesting example of metal and folk-ballad crossover; this type it's a metal band doing a folk-ballad song in mostly the folk-ballad style -- and it reminded me just how excellent that cover is, so I went and listened to the original studio recording. (Tamplin's reaction video is based on the live version on the Conan Show, probably because it has better shots of what Draiman is doing.)

Tamplin had also compared the way that this "Sound of Silence" version starts out with very quiet but intense emotionality and then ramps it up and up through the song to Johnny Cash's "Hurt" (also a cover, from Nine Inch Nails), so I went to look that one up, and found this music video of it he did, which is ... wow. It's from the same energy as David Bowie's BlackStar: This is the last album; there shall not be another, and this is who I am. Powerful stuff, and the video is art that only enhances that power.

(There's also some interesting context about the song on the genius.com lyric page.)

Anyway, I also wanted to go remind myself what Disturbed's usual music was like, which was an interesting thing because it seems that doing "The Sound of Silence" was a bit of a turning point. It was unlike anything they'd done before ("Down With the Sickness was, I gather, sort of the definitive early-Disturbed piece), but in the four years since then they seem to have been doing quite a few more songs with what Draiman describes as an "etherial, orchestral, acoustic, let the vulnerability of the vocal stand out" style rather than the "upbeat, aggressive, rhythmic, in-your-face" style.

The first one I found was A Reason to Fight, which is a blunt in-your-face anti-suicide song, and it's again doing the thing with dynamic range and intense emotion, and it will definitely pull tears. From there I also found "Inside The Fire", which comes with something I've not seen on a music video before: a half-minute prefatory bit of sober commentary from the lead singer that amounts to a trigger warning about depiction of suicide -- which is, I note, appropriate. As Draiman put it a bit obliquely, it's a subject that's "rather close to me, having dealt with an actual occurrence of it many years ago," and there's clearly a deep well of emotion that he's pouring out in this album.

There's also several of their recent songs that are on the similar topic of making the most of the life one has. "What Are You Waiting For" is one of the "aggressive" songs with chorus lyrics of "Believe in every dream that you got / You only living once so tell me / What are you, what are you waiting for?" And "Hold On To Memories" is another one of the lyrical ones, and hopeful, and a good place to end this post.

...Well, okay, one very last one, because it ties the two threads back together. Another of the artists Leo Moracchioli collaborated with is Lillian Rinaldo, and looking on her channel, I found that she did a cover of Disturbed's cover of "A Sound of Silence".

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

On "Planked Possum"

brooksmoses — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 07:08:16 GMT

Because planked possum was one of the things I'd heard about from my dad growing up, I assumed it was a cultural thing that "everyone" knew about -- or, at least, everyone with vaguely similar cultural background. Thus, I was really surprised at the paucity of results I found when I tried a Google search to find a context link for a reference to it in my previous post. There were really only two links to any sort of explanation at all, both of which were to things embedded inside larger non-html documents.

The joke is basically a riff on how opossum is considered at least by some people to be inedible, or at best the sort of thing that only the most backwoodsy of backwoods people would consider eating. The truth (and here there were far more Google results) seems to be that, because they're scavengers, the flavor is highly variable depending on what they've been feeding on.

Anyway, so the joke. The recipe for planked possum is that you start by taking a plank, and you attach the possum to the plank, and roasting it. This should generally be told with lots of culinary details and flourishes: A fresh-cut cedar plank, layers of cut onions between the possum and the plank, that sort of thing. Then, once this has roasted for an unreasonable length of time, you take it out of the oven, and for the punchline you discard the possum and eat the plank.

The "Interview with Jack S. Baird and Richard S. Potter, 1982" from UTSA's Oral History Collection has a really nice example of the genre, which seems to have taken inspiration from the interview being held at the East Texas Yamboree -- a folk festival honoring yams. ("M" is the interviewer, "P" is the interviewee, and they're talking generally about things that he's talked about at his "Possumology" show at the festival and here specifically about recipes.)

M: Tell [me] about the Possum Treat.
P: Well, you get about a 5, 6 pound possum, clean it good and get most of the fat tissue off of the carcass. Then you parboil it and you get about 6 East Texas yams and you cut them lengthwise. Then get half, three quarter[s of a] cup of good syrup, [from] ribbon cane, East Texas ribbon cane, and you bring it to a boil. Boil it about 4, 5 minutes, turn it off ... just keep it on warm. Then you get a white oak board ... that's what most of 'em use ... and it's usually an inch thick and 12 by 18 inches in length. You put the possum in the center and you surround it by the yams.
M: Have the yams been baked?
P: The yams have been parboiled. Possum has been parboiled as well. To finish it and get the sweet syrupy taste, you pour some of the syrup on it, put it in a 250 degree oven and cook it for about 2 hours. About every 30 minutes, baste it with the ribbon cane syrup ... on the possum and the yams. And at the end of 2 or 2 1/2 hours, you remove it from the oven and go to the nearest garbage can and scrape off the possum and the yams into the can and then you eat the board. It's a delightful flavor.

So there you go. Now maybe there are three findable references online.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Cooking in the Real World, episode 782.

brooksmoses — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 06:39:34 GMT

In which I produce a reasonably tasty dinner out of what is in the kitchen and a fair bit of luck. Also in which I grumble about recipes that use almost homeopathic garlic quantities.

Yesterday's dinner turned out to be an interesting combination of recipe and improvisation, and I was thinking as I was doing that a stream-of-consciousness narrative of the process would be entertaining. I can't do that now, but what follows is an attempt at reconstructing it.

This started about 6:30 with an agreement to figure out something for dinner, and an idea that it should probably involve the spaghetti squash that I had bought a couple of weeks ago. I looked online for how to cook a spaghetti squash, and found a general consensus of splitting it in half and baking the halves face-down in a 350-to-400-degree oven for 40-60 minutes. I also noticed this recipe for spaghetti squash with chickpeas and kale, which looked tasty and lined up very conveniently with the bag of kale in the fridge that we needed to cook. Even more conveniently, it also would use some of the shallots that have been sitting on our counter for a month waiting for us to find a purpose for them.

So, a plan. I started the squash baking -- set the oven to 425 because I was running a little late, split the squash and scraped the seeds out with a spoon, put it on a baking tray on a bit of parchment paper, and put it in, with a timer set for 40 minutes. I'd salted and peppered it lightly according to the recipe, but I figured that the oil didn't seem likely to do anything useful (and the parchment paper would keep it from sticking) so I left it off. I didn't bother waiting for the oven to preheat; for something like this, it doesn't matter and I could cook it a little longer at the end if it needed it.

Then, I reset the timer for 25 minutes, since the kale and such gets cooked separately and seemed likely to need 15 minutes or so to cook. This way, the timer would tell me when that needed to start.

Squash and kale isn't a complete dinner, though, so I looked in the freezer, found a fillet of rockfish that needed eating (it was starting to look slightly freezerburned on the edges), and set that in a bowl of water on the counter to thaw.

The squash-and-kale recipe has one of the stranger approaches to homeopathic garlic quantities that I have seen. It's almost like planked possum (and how on earth is it that those are the only two references to planked possum I could find online?): You take a single lonely garlic clove, whole, and place it in the pan to saute with the shallot and spices. And then, when they are cooked, you take out the garlic clove and discard it.

I appreciate that some people do not particularly like garlic, but this is a waste of a good garlic clove. If you do not like garlic, leave it out.

Suzanne does not particularly like garlic, so I left it out.

She pointed out to me, at about this point in the dinner preparation when I was telling her about the garlic in this recipe, that she also does not like spaghetti squash.

I did notice that the bag of kale was probably four to six cups or so, packed, depending on how tightly one were to pack it, and the recipe only wanted two cups, so that wouldn't be a big issue; I'd simply leave half the kale mixture out as lack of spaghetti squash with chickpeas and kale, and that would be tasty too.

Thus, I chopped up two shallots (they were small) and put them aside in a small pyrex dish, and went out to the backyard to get some rosemary sticks off the rosemary bush that is in badly need of pruning, and pulled the leaves off those and chopped them up and put them on top of the shallots, and put some salt and pepper and a little bit of red pepper flake in, and checked with the recipe that that was all of the small-quantity ingredients, and then chopped up a third shallot for good measure because there was a lot of kale.

At this point I basically abandoned the recipe; the remaining instructions were to saute this all in olive oil with the chickpeas (unless they were roasted, in which case they were to be added later), and then mix with the kale and cook that, and then shred the squash and mix that all in. None of this required looking back at the recipe.

Somewhere around here, the timer went off, and I reset it for 15 more minutes. I also checked on the fish, which was still stiff in the thickest part, so I poured out the now-quite-cold water it was in and replaced it with lukewarm water.

I put the finned 14-inch frying pan on the stove (the idea of putting heat-sink-like fins on the bottom of a pan to absorb the heat from a gas stove more effectively is genius), on medium, and waited until it got warm and put in a good dollop of olive oil and sloshed it around in the pan. This is one of the things that I learned recently about nonstick pans and wish I had known earlier: The nonstick property is vastly increased if you put in some oil after the pan gets hot and coat the surface with it. If you look closely, you can see that the surface is slightly darker where the oil has washed over it.

The large frying pan doesn't have the color-change thing in the middle like our smaller frying pans do to indicate when it's hot, so I usually hold my hand about an inch or two over the middle, palm down, to see if I can feel the heat coming off it. When that feels properly warm, I put the oil in the middle, and when it heats to the viscosity of water (which should only take a few seconds), I swish it around to wash over all of the bottom of the pan, and then run it around the edge up an inch or so. Depending on what I'm cooking, I'll adjust the amount of oil I add. For onions or shallots or such, I want to have a few tablespoons left over, because the onions soak it up and I don't want them going dry. For things where I don't want much extra oil, it does take a bit of practice.

Once I'd dumped the shallot-and-rosemary dish into the pan and stirred it a bit and turned the heat down a little so it didn't need continuous stirring, I located a can of chickpeas. We had two large cans, which seemed a bit big, and one small can that had a previous iteration of the relevant brand's graphical design. I figured that the small can was in the "this should be used" state, and made sure it was sloshing properly when shaken (bean-liquid sometimes ends up sort of dry and clay-like in the can, even without going bad, but chickpeas in particular ought to slosh when shaken), and drained and washed them in the sink. I have a from-Kickstarter bowl with a mesh-covered spout on the side about two inches below the edge, intended for washing things like berries, which is not necessarily all that great for berries but is perfect for chickpeas, so I used that.

I then put some olive oil in a second baking tray (I find the enameled metal lower half of a roasting pan is ideal for this), and put the washed chickpeas in it, and set them on the top shelf of the oven to roast -- it turns out that canned chickpeas really taste substantially better when roasted, and it's quite easy to do that when one's already cooking something. The top shelf of a 425-degree oven might not be precisely ideal for this, though -- when they were reasonably done ten minutes later, I was alerted to this fact by a few of them popping like popcorn.

So, back to the fish, after stirring the shallots. Pretty much all of the second part of the story should be implicitly punctuated by stirring the shallots. I got out one of the aforementioned smaller frying pans with color-changing bits in the middle, and put it on a small burner to get hot. When that was warm, I was about to put in olive oil, but remembered that my new habit is cooking fish with butter -- it's substantially tastier. So, a pat of butter into the pan. For this, I don't want it quite as hot as with the oil; the butter should melt slowly and not immediately brown.

I then took out the fish, shook it dry, and sat it on a small plate to spice. My usual recipe is salt, black pepper (white pepper is traditional but is also another thing to keep around, so I don't), and some smoked paprika -- Penzey's has a really good smoked Spanish paprika, and a little dash of it on the fish gives the butter a nice orange color as well as adding flavor. Then I put the fish, spiced side down, in the slightly-browned butter and spiced the other side in the same way. The plate then went in the sink, as it had raw fish juice on it.

The chickpeas had now been in for ten minutes, and I was hearing an occasional muffled popping sound from the oven, so I took those out and stirred them around a bit and collected the three that popped out of the pan when they were stirred onto a bit of hot oil, and poured them into the shallot mixture.

Then, I started adding the kale to the mixture. With greens like spinach or chard, mixing with onions and/or chickpeas or such can be a bit tricky -- if you put all the greens in at once, you end up with large clumps of cooked greens that won't separate with the stirring to get onions or whatever in between them. A while ago I realized that this was rather like gravy where if you add in the milk quickly you get lumps that are hard to mix out, but if you add a little milk at a time you can mix it to a thick paste and then a slightly thinner paste and so on down to a smooth non-lumpy consistency, because there's never the the lumps-and-thin-liquid state. It works the same way with greens and onions -- add a little bit, mix it well, and repeat, and you don't get the clumps of greens. Kale has enough texture that it's probably not going to have this clumping problem, but I did it in stages anyway.

Doing the kale in stages also meant that I could notice when it was starting to get a bit dry in the pan (which we don't really want because then the chickpeas start sticking and getting broken apart). I put a quarter-cup or so of water in the now-empty little glass shallot dish, and poured that into the pan and mixed it around to steam the kale. I ended up doing that twice more as I added more kale -- just enough that it would reasonably quickly boil off but provide a good bit of steam in the process. Once the kale was basically done, I also added some lemon juice, in a "that looks good" sort of amount, since the recipe had called for some.

The fish was looking ready to flip over at this point, so I went to do that, and realized that I was using my preferred fish-flipper -- a thin and flexible plastic turner -- for the kale because it was also the ideal tool for that. Rather than getting fish on it and needing to clean it or else get fishy flavor in the kale or else need to switch to something else for the kale, I considered that this fish was just one piece that was reasonably thick and structurally coherent (not yet near the flaking apart stage), so I just flipped it with the pan like an omelette. This is surprisingly not-difficult with practice (the rubber circles used for opening jars are good practice subjects, if they will slide easily in your pan), and it worked just fine, though it always feels a bit edgy and impressive.

At this point the kale was all in and cooking, and I had a couple of minutes, so I washed the plate I'd used earlier and then used it to put the cooked fish on when it was done in a couple more minutes. On consideration, this didn't really seem like enough fish for the three of us, so I got out the leftover sole from a couple of nights previously, and put that in the pan to warm up.

It had at this point been rather more than the planned 40 minutes, so I took the squash out of the oven and set it on the stovetop to cool for a moment, and took about half of the kale mixture out into a bowl for serving. Putting things in a glass bowl makes them look quite a lot fancier than just serving them from the pan, and the effect is sort of surprising every time.

Then I shredded the squash out with a pair of forks (which also work fairly well as paddles to pick up the hot squash and maneuver it onto a cutting board) into a larger bowl -- basically, use one fork in one's off hand to steady the squash, and scrape the inside away from it with the other fork to pull off strands, and then use both to scoop up the strands and transfer them to the bowl. This turned out to have a fair bit of wateriness, possibly because of being cooked a little long and being slightly mushier than I'd intended (though still quite fine; squash really doesn't need anything like precise cooking). Thus, when I'd scraped all of it out of the squash skins, I dumped it into the frying pan and mixed it there so some of the water would boil away.

The recipe had called for adding sun-dried tomatoes and optionally some shredded parmesan cheese at this point, and while we didn't have whole sun-dried tomatoes we did have some sun-tried tomato bruschetta mixture (which was basically tomatoes, olive oil, and garlic -- so the garlic ended up in the recipe that way instead!), and I figured a couple of medium-sized spoonfuls looked reasonable, so I added that and mixed it in. Then a generous amount of shredded parmesan we happened to have -- did I mention that this recipe seemed remarkably well-aligned to what we had on hand? -- and mixed that together, and cooked it a few more minutes to remove a little more moisture, and put it back in the glass bowl, and called it done.

Anyway, it always seems notable to me how much difference there is between how cooking a dinner seems to work out in practice and what the recipe describes, if I'm cooking an everyday dinner rather than something I've specifically bought ingredients for and where I want to precisely follow the recipe, and this seemed a particularly good example of all that. And, even without the divergence from the recipe, the amount of words it takes to actually describe all the things I did is far more than what the recipe contains.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

In which I feel suddenly out of sync with technological trends.

brooksmoses — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 05:53:58 GMT

My watch has started losing time, which I'm fairly sure means it needs a new battery.

This should be fairly simple, right? It's a standard watch battery size, and while department stores and the like have stopped replacing the batteries when you buy a new one, I can do that part. Just need to stop by the store and buy a battery.

The first indication that this would not be so simple was this morning, when I stopped by the grocery store. It turns out that grocery stores, or at least the one I go to, have stopped carrying watch batteries of any ilk. So that was a bust, but at least a straightforward one.

This evening, I stopped by Fry's, which is our local "electronics superstore" -- sort of an small-local-chain equivalent of Best Buy except that the Sunnyvale store is at least twice the size of any Best Buy I've ever been in. Their website said they had the right size in stock. However, the store itself is ... well, first off, the electronic components and suchlike shelves gave me an immediate understanding of why the first Google autocomplete suggestions for "Sunnyvale Frys" was "closing". They are not closing the store, to my knowledge, but Orchard Supply had more stock on their shelves until the last week of their two-month-long going-out-of-business sale. The small rack of watch batteries, in the middle of a mostly-empty aisle, did have stock on most of the pegs. But they did not have a peg for either the claimed-in-stock 2-packs of 377-size batteries (which cost $2.99 online), or a peg for the claimed-out-of-stock single packs (which cost $0.99). They did have a rather sad, old, and battered-looking "check the size of your watch battery" display/tester thing sitting on top of the rack -- and I looked, and essentially all of the sizes that it had on it did not correspond to anything they had a peg for, and vice-versa.

So, I then went to Target, which also claimed to have them in stock on their website. I didn't see them on the rack in the "electronics" section -- although they did at least have watch batteries there. The helpful attendant in the section tried to find them on his little phone-sized handheld inventory-searching device for me -- as he noted, there were something like 8 or 10 battery displays around the store, and it could be on any of them. He didn't find them with any of the obvious searches (and, for some reason, the device converted his search on "377 battery" to "377 Batterybattery"), but eventually we tried "377 watch", which worked and gave the location as "checkstand 20". It was not at all clear what it meant, given that the checkstand numbers only go up to 14, but there was a battery display next to one of the checkstands, with different watch batteries on it, and a square mobile "battery" display rack in middle of the aisle near the checkstands that had yet different watch batteries on it. Neither of these had a peg for 377 batteries, though.

And this all leaves me with the realization that in the very few years since I last tried to buy watch batteries, watch batteries have basically stopped being a thing people buy with any regularity. People who want wristwatches get rechargeable smartwatches, I guess, which has rather quickly killed whatever part of the watch market was left after cellphones became popular. I'm left with the thought that fiddly mechanical watches will probably keep running long after the durable and simple and reliable quartz electronic ones are unusable for lack of batteries, and also the more relevant thought that I feel unexpectedly completely out of step with "normal" in a way I wasn't at all expecting to.

Anyway, I ended up ordering a replacement from Digikey. Although I see that there's also a reseller on eBay who's somewhere in Sunnyvale (probably closer to me than the Fry's is) and will sell me a box of 200 of them from China for $19 including shipping.

It's a weird world.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

In which my life conspires to imply a horrible pun....

brooksmoses — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 07:59:29 GMT

Most of this story is just setting up context.

There's a local company out of the Monterey Bay called Real Good Fish, which is basically like a farm share except with fisheries. They sell subscriptions, and each week you get some sort of fish or seafood that was locally and sustainably caught. Or occasionally with some of the shellfish, sustainably farm-raised. Where a farm-share would typically deliver a stack of boxes to various local pick-up points, Real Good Fish delivers a large cooler of ziplock-bags of fish. One of their local pick-up points is on Google's Mountain View campus, and since that's pretty close to our house, I volunteer to do the various "local site host" things. What that means is that I meet the delivery-person mid-day on Thursday to bring the cooler into the building, and then in the evening (or sometimes Friday) I go back to empty the ice and fishy water out of the cooler, and occasionally collect any forgotten fish shares.

This week, the delivery happened to be mussels. I've found that, while mussels and oysters are great in theory, in practice they're a lot of prep work for not much result, so I (and a couple of other people at our site) have signed up for the "shellfish opt-out" option, and on weeks when they would normally bring us shellfish, they bring us some other sort of fish instead. This week, it was filets of a large species of flatfish.

As usual, after meeting the delivery, I picked my fish out of the cooler and took it back to my office building to put it in the fridge there. That's in the far side of the Sunnyvale Google campus, about ten minutes down the highway from the Mountain View campus.

When I left this afternoon, I was hurrying out for an appointment and thus forgot and left my fish in the fridge. After the appointment we ended up having a late dinner and then I spent a while faffing about for a while rather than going to empty the cooler. It got to be quite late, and I considered leaving the cooler until tomorrow, but mussels can get a bit smelly fairly quickly, and it's easier to get to the building in the evening rather than mid-day when it's all busy, so I decided to go ahead and go empty it.

And, while I was there, I considered whether I wanted to also go get my fish from the office fridge.

And so...

...

(wait for it)

...

...actually, no, I did not in fact drive to Sunnyvale tonight just for the halibut. It was too late, and I was too tired, and the halibut will be fine in the fridge until tomorrow.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

I think we may need to trim the cat's claws.

brooksmoses — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 07:01:55 GMT

This observation brought to you by the feeling of hearing the cat making an odd noise on the kitchen counter, and looking over and seeing her spread out most of the way up the window screen with no other means of support.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

A quite productive day.

brooksmoses — Tue, 28 May 2019 07:39:30 GMT

The first couple of days of the long weekend were mostly full of inertness; apparently I needed it. But today I wanted to get something done, and so after lunch I took a piece of paper and stuck it to the fridge with a "Strong Like Bull" fridge magnet, which gives a very satisfying "thunk" feel to posting a list on the fridge, and wrote some things on it that I wanted to get done.

Through the day I added more things and crossed things off, and by the end of the day I had:

fetched potting soil and fertilizer and a pot from the local nursery, along with some mulch, and repotted my little apple tree that has one leaf right now,
cut some of the wildflowers next to the driveway that had gotten knocked down, and put them in a vase,
broken down the pile of empty boxes in the office and put them in the recycle bin,
emptied the dishwasher and refilled it,
washed the couple of dirty pots and pans in the sink, and cleaned the kitchen counters,
helped Suzanne with clearing out the back garden, including taking out several thistles that had grown taller than me,
cooked a couple of quarts of oatmeal (with slivered almonds and dried currants in it) for breakfasts through the week,
and started a load of laundry.

And probably a handful of little things I've forgotten, too. There are still a couple of things on the list that didn't get done, but I'm leaving it up for tomorrow after work.

I need to remember this technique for the future. Having the list definitely helped -- both with motivation, and with remembering all the various things I wanted to get done.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Today's random amusement: ancient CAD programs.

brooksmoses — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 08:19:01 GMT

This morning I did an hour-long class on OnShape, which is a modern spiffy CAD (computer-aided design) program that runs in your browser and stores documents in The Cloud and does all the heavy computation on the server side. It's pretty cool, and they have a free license for hobbyist use if you don't mind all your designs being public.

In the class, I mentioned that most of my previous experience was from the undergraduate mechanical engineering class on using CAD that I took in 1994, and I had imprinted pretty hard on the program we used then and still had a copy running in an emulator. This led to a bit of good-natured teasing about "something better than DOS-based CAD programs" later in the class, which inspired me to do a thing this evening to show off why I like it -- the UI is really quite excellent for quick usage by power users while still being usable by less-experienced people.

And so I did a short speed run, replicating the drawing we'd done in class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAIgH_nn_DU

There are all kinds of improvements that have come in the 25 years since this CAD program was created (particularly in what you can do with a drawing like this once it's drawn), but I'm curious if he'll manage to beat my time.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

So, that was rather a confluence of tiny mostly-amusing challenges....

brooksmoses — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 07:11:50 GMT

I was at a party this evening in a no-shoes house. When I went to collect my shoes from the pile, at the end of the evening, I couldn't find them. I did see a set of rather more beat-up ones that looked superficially similar and were the same size, but distinctly were not mine.

So, well, I was raised a country boy. It's been a few (ahem) years since I drove home barefoot, but no worries, I can do that.

Second problem is that I forgot to recharge my electric car at work today, and it doesn't have the range to get home from the party, so I need to go charge it. This shouldn't be a problem; I realized the issue before I left work, and confirmed that there was a fast-charge station in a Walgreen's parking lot a couple of miles away.

I found the Walgreen's, and the parking lot, and the charger in the parking lot, no problem. And I even figured out where the release was for the cover for the fast-charge port on my car, which I hadn't used before. So, I plugged the charger cable in, and looked at the screen on the charger, and it said something like "Wait a moment...."

I waited a moment. I waited a few more moments. It didn't do anything. I pushed the "start" button, which did nothing, and I pushed the "stop" button, which also did nothing. This did not seem promising.

However, there was a handy electrical junction box next to the charger, with a big switch on the side. After confirming that this looked like it only went to the charger, I tried power-cycling it. It turns out that turning a 60kW switch on or off makes a fairly satisfying ka-chunk sound. It also turns out that it does not solve this particular problem with the this particular charger, although when it booted it did have a nice little "This SD card is not connected" Windows-esque dialog box (with a little "ACK" button on it) on top of the "wait a moment..." screen.

Right, then. Next plan. I knew there were also some regular chargers a block away, so I went to find those.

Those turned out to be in a municipal parking lot that had locked gates at 11:30pm at night.

So. With modern networking (smartphone acting as wifi hotspot -- conveniently, I had specifically remembered my cellphone today -- and laptop), I was able to locate some more fast-charge stations a couple of blocks away, in a Walmart parking not. One of the two of them was even powered on, though I could not say the same for the other one.

It did not have a working credit-card reader, however. It told me to swipe my card, but then it completely ignored it. It ignored my other card. I tried all four possible directions. It continued ignoring them.

The charger did have a sign on it saying that one could also use the phone app from the company that runs it, so I started downloading that.

About this time, another person drove up in their electric car, also wanting a charge. I mentioned to them that the other charger wasn't working, and this one didn't have a working card reader, but they had the app on their phone already, and conveniently also they needed the other of the two plug types. So they started charging their car.

They also took a look at my feet, as I was standing barefoot on the damp concrete parking lot -- oh, did I mention that it's raining a bit? -- and asked if my feet were cold. I told them about the party and missing shoes, and they were very amused, and said I deserved mad props for being comfortable standing there barefoot, and asked if they could take a photo of me.

Then we discovered that the charger only has power to do one connector at a time, but they didn't need it for long. And so now they have left, and I have written this post and am about to post it, and my car is also sufficiently charged to head home.

Still no idea about my shoes, though!

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

In which I wrote a silly thing.

brooksmoses — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 03:48:39 GMT

Simone Giertz is a lovely person who has lots of fun creating horribly ineffective robots and posting videos of them to YouTube, in celebration of the fact that you don't need to be good at something to enjoy it. She also has a Patreon where she shares videos and also has recently been talking about the process of having a benign brain tumor removed. In celebration of the last round of radiation treatment being done, she created a mural on the wall of her workshop/studio, and posted a video of making it.

She also challenged us to write our "loftiest art reviews" in the comments, and so I wrote one, which I figure some of you might also be amused by.

The review....

This bold new masterpiece by the enigmatic Ms. Giertz shows again her control of her chosen media to illustrate the poignancies of a modern life in which humanity is reduced to a cog in a machine with an unclear purpose and limited value. Much as with her widely-renowned "soup robot", which shares a similar color palette and splattering effect, Giertz makes herself mechanically central to the implementation of her work, so that the piece is in some sense a self portrait of her own sense of place in reality, as well as speaking to the common human experience.

It is through this lens of self-portraiture that we can best understand many of the nuances of "Unnamed Mural 2019". Not only do the orange-and-yellow palette and the splattering nature of the work recall "Soup Robot", but the use of pulleys and ropes recall other of Giertz's self-proclaimed "Shitty Robot" oeuvre. This is indeed a re-imagining of her work to this point, taking it and reshaping it as something new. However, in this instance Giertz no longer places herself at the mercy of a mechanical creation that is separate from herself in a state of ambiguous cooperation or conflict. Instead she places herself at the center of the mechanism, in full control and inseparable from it.

The symbolism within the piece also speaks to recent events in Giertz's personal life. In the two orange hemicircles in the lower portion of the piece, we see a semi-representational reflection of the hemispheres of the bicameral brain, with a gap in one hemisphere representing the recent surgical removal of a benign tumor from Giertz's brain that she had humorously referred to as "Brian".

The words at the bottom of the wall, spelling "boring white wall" in bold capital letters, written with a precise casualness in yellow and a touch of green, provide a balancing counterpoint to the celebratory spray of bootprints at the top of the work. The choice of yellow and green here, leaving the orange for the "brain", reflects the way in which this piece itself is the interaction between Giertz and the wall -- two distinct components that interact with each other. It is particularly telling that these words are the sole piece of the work that Giertz did not create with her body, retaining their separateness from her. We can further understand this through the metaphor of Magritte's infamous "pipe" that is not a pipe; what is important is not that the wall is no longer white and boring, but that it is a representation of a white and boring wall becoming a part of Giertz's creation.

Giertz chooses to interact with the wall with her feet, not only creating an illusion of flight, but also showing that she feels she is askew to the usual interactions with the world. This is a wall, not a floor turned 90 degrees -- the caption ensures that we do not mistake it for that -- but nonetheless Giertz jumps upon it and leaves her footprints, literally showing us a path upwards out of boringness and mundanity.

Completing the mural, the upper half of the work is a spray of orange, yellow, and touches of green -- a display of exuberance, celebration, and upward flight, reflecting Giertz's own feelings of lightness, relief, and aspiration as she is no longer held back by the tumor. The use of all three colors, the yellow and green from the "boring white wall" caption and the orange of Giertz's brain, shows that this celebration is a synthesis of the two into something new; an artist cannot create without a canvas, and a canvas is not art without an artist, but creation exists in what is here a quite literal dance of the two together. This spray is also reminiscent of the display of a peacock's tail feathers (echoed in the teal blue color), and while the symbolism may be overused and hackneyed, this represents the young artist's disdain for subtlety as she displays her creations and herself to the world.

Finally, however, the piece is accompanied by smaller canvases that were placed on the floor to catch the "drips" from the creation process. These should be considered as an important piece of the overall work; this is not just a celebration for this wall, but one to be brought out into the world as an inspiration to others to interact with their own canvases -- to dance with them, if you will -- and produce their own celebrations in echo of this one.

...end review...

I was basically pulling all that out of thin air or dark orifices, so I'm not sure what to make of the fact that after writing it I half-believe all the stuff I wrote about the "obvious" symbolism in the piece.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Things that I said on looking at the listing for a $3.4-million house.

brooksmoses — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 09:17:24 GMT

suzannemoses was randomly looking at house listings, and came across this $3.4-million house north of Boston, not too far from where kiya lives.

There are many things to say about this house. Among the ones I actually said were:

"When your closet has an emergency-stop button, your closet is excessive."

and

"I have never seen a four-poster Jacuzzi with a fireplace before...."

(She also found this rather nice hotel -- spoiler: not actually a hotel -- which was just sort of random overdone mansion, until it got to the closeup of the ceiling and I said, "Oh. It has cherubs in.")

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

The "How I Actually Cook" Chronicles: The Mussels Episode

brooksmoses — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 05:19:04 GMT

Tonight was one of those nights where suzannemoses is out, and there wasn't anything in the fridge that was particularly collated into "dinner ingredients." There were leftovers, but I was not really wanting most of them.

What there was, primarily, was a large bag of mussels from our community-supported fishery. I've specifically opted out of getting bivalves from them, because Suzanne doesn't like them and so they often just go bad in our fridge rather than being eaten. But someone else forgot to pick theirs up, and so (being the person who cleans out the delivery cooler at the end of the day) I ended up with them.

There was also a half-eaten takeout box of cucumber salad from a local Chinese dumpling place. I took this out and ate the rest of it while pondering. This will be relevant later.

Clearly, though, the solution was to cook the mussels. The fishery had suggested this recipe for mussels in white-wine broth, so I looked there for inspiration.

Mussels, in most recipes, annoy me. This recipe was no exception.

The recipe called for cooking the mussels, making a cream/broth/white-wine sauce, and tossing the mussels with the sauce while still in their shells. The result is that you have to pick the mussels out of the shells at the table, and you get lots of lovely delicious sauce on the shells that you're not going to eat, and a plateful of shells only produces a tiny amount of actual mussel meat.

On the other hand, the recipe did give me a basic idea of how to cook the mussels -- clean them, put them in a pot with about a cup and a half of liquid, and steam for 6-10 minutes until the shells open. The recipe suggested a mixture of chicken broth and white wine, but I had no chicken broth and figured watered-down white wine is probably a waste of wine, so I just used water.

And then, since the container for the cucumber salad was handy, and had a couple of tablespoons of liquid in it that seemed to mostly be a sort of miso-based briny liquid with a good bit of diced raw garlic in it, I dumped that on top. Why not?

Once the mussels were done cooking, I took them out of their shells. From a full 3.5-quart stockpot, I ended up with a 6-ounce custard dish of shelled mussels.

I noticed that the remaining water in the cookpot was fairly cloudy, so I tasted it, and it turned out to be a fairly strong shellfish-broth. (And more of it than the water I'd put in; I think there was some salty water in some of the mussel shells.) Score! I poured it into a tub to freeze for later use, and pondered what to do with the mussels, because a 6-ounce custard cup of meat is not really a dinner.

It occurred to me that a thing one usually finds with shellfish to bulk out the meal is pasta, so I hunted around and found a half-used bag of casarecce pasta (sort of dense little twists) to use. Now, for some reason -- presumably lots of Rice-a-roni meals -- I keep thinking of Kraft Mac-and-Cheese Dinner being cooked with just enough water for the pasta, rather than being drained. And thus I thought of doing this that way, using some of the mussel broth. So I put a cup or so of the broth back in the pan, along with a pat of butter since the recipe I'd looked at suggested it, and put in the pasta, and then -- predictably -- remembered that that was how boxed rice dinners work, not boxed pasta dinners.

Oh well. I remembered an article I'd read a couple of months ago on testing various ways of cooking dried pasta, which concluded that so long as there's sufficient soaking time and the right amount of cooking time (which usually overlaps with soaking but needn't necessarily do so), it basically didn't matter. And so I figured that doing it sort of like risotto -- adding bits of broth when it needed more, but not too much so it ends up absorbing most of it, and stirring often -- should be fine anyway.

And, indeed, that worked out. About halfway through I switched from broth to water. I also adjusted the temperature up a bit at the end because (as with risotto) I always forget that it is much slower taking in liquid when it's almost cooked and so I need to add smaller amounts, and so there was a bit of extra liquid to boil down.

I confirmed (by tasting a piece) that the pasta was in fact basically done, and then added a little more butter and the third of a cup of cream that was left in a container in the fridge from some cooking last week (or possibly week-before-last; cream keeps rather longer than milk) and cooked that down a bit, and put in a bit of pepper (also recommended by the recipe), and stirred in the mussels.

The end result was really, really good. The reduced broth and cream and starch cooked off the pasta made a silky-rich sauce, with a robust shellfish taste even in the bites without bits of mussel in them.

And so that's how I made dinner tonight from basically five ingredients including a bag of mussels, some leftover takeout cucumber salad, and a half-empty bag of pasta.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Random funny technology things.

brooksmoses — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 03:27:42 GMT

I just calibrated my computer monitor with one of those fancy light-sensor dealies. I had hopes that it would improve things, as I've known that everything brighter than a light gray was getting pushed to white -- and, for some reason, this was happening on two separate monitors I had, on two independent computers.

I was surprised how much difference this made, though. It's striking -- the grays that were getting shoved up into "white" are a significant range. I can now see the tabs on my Chrome window! Google maps actually shows the roads clearly! There are so many more gradiations! I had no idea!

This probably means that all the highlights in the photo editing I've done in the past several years has been way off, though.

(Also, this did confirm my impression that the default brightness on my new monitor is absurd, though. After taking a room-brightness measurement, the software said basically, "That's bright! Maybe turn down the room lights a bit?" And then it turned out that the monitor should have the brightness dialed down to about 33% to match anyway.)

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Gaming: Epic Battle is Epic

brooksmoses — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 08:29:24 GMT

Today was a day that, by the end of it, I rather needed to be smashing some fictional undead hordes. Conveniently, today was a day in which our gaming campaign delivered.

Today was a day in which our gaming battle had a Metallica soundtrack. Literally.

Today is a day in which this is long, so I'll put the writeup behind a cut tag.

We're in the climactic final days of this multi-year campaign. We're deep inside the bowels of the Stone Thief, literally, with mythic spears of destruction and a sword that literally has the Stone Thief's eight-syllable (or possibly nine) name on it, and on a mission from ... well, okay, the council on what to do about the Stone Thief didn't really come to any useful agreement, but we are on a mission whether they sent us or not.

We just fought our way into an erupting volcano.

Luckily, the path led to a tunnel with a magically-enhanced doorway that is now keeping the volcano firmly out, so we had a brief moment to catch our breath, but we're now on to the next battle.

The start of this was a wave of what our necromancer will explain to Cal later as time-and-death magic. What Cal knew of it was that he was hit with a wave of remembering the time that the party was pretty much entirely defeated when the Emperor's wedding went horribly wrong in a massive battle of demigods, and he attacked the black void that had replaced the Elf Queen, and her soul stepped into his body and slowly took him over. (The last part did not actually happen in our timeline.)

Mechanically, Ken (the GM) had asked each of us to describe a time, ideally on-screen, when we had nearly died, and then he twisted it so that we actually died. We then had to roll a save to resist the false memory.

I went first, and I rolled a natural 1.

Ken asked me to figure out how I had gotten out of this in the memory.

Everyone else succeeded at theirs. Our warrior-druid remembered the time when he'd perhaps-unwisely lept down onto a platform full of half-orcs wielding pikes, trusting in his ability to sweep the pikes out of the way, and ended up skewered on one of them. At my suggestion, in the false memory he successfully swept the pikes out of the way ... and missed the platform and just kept going down into the darkness. Our wizard remembered the time that he had been lofted on a giant kite to pelt fireballs down at an army of orcs only to find out they had some artillery, which should tell you all you need to know about him. And our necromancer basically remembered "right now", because in-character he is a smartass like that.

So, back to me. How did I get out of this? I looked Ken straight in the eye and said, "I am the Elf Queen."

Sadly, although that did score a successful hit on the GM's sense of humor, I did not back this up with a successful roll-to-save to avoid the mechanical effects of being taken unconscious. And then I backed up being unconscious by rolling another natural 1 on my initiative roll for the battle that was starting around us, which in this case only meant I went dead last.

The first round of this battle, we were swarmed by a horde of undead guards, and the necromancer held them off while my fellow party members tried to revive me, in what amounted to a comedy of "I'm an archaeologist, not a doctor!" fails and flails. The wizard was the third person to try, and being a self-taught wizard he had no idea what he was doing but attempted to set the power of lightning flowing through me to awaken me. Luckily he did not crit-fail on that, and in fact succeeded, and I woke up.

While all this was happening, I'd been paging through various spells I could potentially nab that would be in-character for the Elf Queen (mechanically, Cal has various feats that mean he can use three high-level spells from any class in the book, which seemed appropriate for a spy, though it was bending the rules slightly to swap them out on the fly), and so I waved off Ken's suggestion that the awakening had cleared his head of the false memory. Instead, Cal awoke still in the persona of the Elf Queen, and for his turn gave the elf in the party a serious Divine Power Boost.

And so the second round began. It was at about this time that Ken turned on the Metallica soundtrack.

Now, one of the throwaway lines in Cal's character writeup was that he'd once had an undercover assignment where he worked as a roadie for the band "Bardic Thünder". The band itself was a semi-throwaway encounter from before my time in the gaming group, so it had a bit of backstory there too. The umlaut is important, because they are Very Metal Indeed.

When the music started, Cal failed his perception check to see if anyone from "Bardic Thünder" was among the large pile of undead corpses lying around, but that was pretty much irrelevant because the music was clearly theirs, and about halfway through the round we were attacked by a massive mastodon wearing metal-pyramid-spiked leg-bracers with four black-garbed undead death-metal-playing riders on it that one didn't need a perception check to recognize even though they were now undead.

I give you Ken's description of the band: "In front is Mystaune Elfson is a thin gaunt half-elf wizard wearing a black cloak and crackling with lighting -- he rides the lightning. Next is Forgefang the Undying -- an undead robot (well, twice-undead now) bard/necromancer with a humanoid form and bits of flesh gone revealing a metal skeleton. Black Therion is a half-orc barbarian with a big heavy long black coat, a black top hat with raven feathersm and a Spinal-Tap-style moustache; he is known to wield a mean axe. Last is Opeth Darquesoule, a badly-scarred bone-white human with a bow and arrows made of bone."

And so the battle begins properly, as we begin throwing off the undead guards and going for the undead Thünder. Cal's first proper attack is to wait for the end of the song they're opening with, where he knows there's a crescendo that builds up to space where there should be a chord but they skip it the first time through. He hauls out his axe and plays the chord (mechanically, the spell is called "Soundburst" but we renamed it "Power Chord" long ago) to knock the band off their rhythm and also takes out two guards.

Ken paused the soundtrack until their next turn.

Then our wizard attacked all of them (except the half-orc, who'd lept off to attack our warrior) and the mastodon with a lightning bolt ... which fizzled, since their wizard blocked it.

So, on Cal's next turn, I hauled out the classic bardic "Vicious Mockery", and noted that just because you're a metal band doesn't mean you can get away with annoying bards that know you well, and specifically I made a biting comment about how Mystaune had literally learned that counterspell from a scroll he'd won in the county fair midway some years ago, because he'd never managed to make the proper ones from wizarding school work right.

...and that was the end of the evening.

The warrior-druid's player mentioned to me, on the ride home, that I should come up with a playlist of my own for next week. Especially since I'm planning to go down the list of thematically-appropriate spells, and the next one up is "Song of Thunder".

So, thoughts? I'm pretty sure Red Rider's "Lunatic Fringe" is the opener, but then what?

Given the start of the battle, obviously I need some Queen in there, but "We Will Rock You" is a bit too obvious.

Also, I'm thinking this lovely bit of style mashup is going to have to go in there just for completely throwing the Thünder off their game.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

"Steering into the skid"

brooksmoses — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 08:24:45 GMT

A person might think that a post with that title was using it as a metaphor. This would be a reasonable thing to expect; it is a quite useful metaphor. However, this post is about the literal meaning of the phrase.

This came up because suzannemoses and I were driving on highway 101 recently, and it was quite wet from the rain, and I saw (and Suzanne heard) a car three lanes over spin into the sound-block wall at the side of the road. We were in the far left lane, and the relevant vehicle was in the exit lane on the far right, just slightly ahead of us. I presume I glanced over because they started spinning; by the time I had actually glanced over, they were somewhere between sideways and backwards, and obviously doing a reasonably-lazy slide into the wall -- the sort where there was an audible crunch as the front bumper hit the wall and had its cover pulled off, and probably the side of the car would be banged up, but probably slow enough not to cause injury.

Anyway, in the "What was that?" conversation immediately thereafter, I mentally looked back at the split-second image I had of them sliding, and realized that the front wheels were turned in a direction that would make the skid worse rather than better.

Using the common phrase that people use for this, I said that they were "steering away from the skid, rather than into it."

Suzanne was quite familiar with the phrase, having grown up in snow country and thus having had it firmly drilled into her head that it was what one did in case of a skid on an icy road, and asked the confirming question of, "So they were turning like this (with gesture), not like that (opposite gesture)?"

Actually, no.

At which point she pointed out that approximately nobody actually explains what "steer into the skid" actually means, and that is a real problem because it is ambiguous!

And so it seems useful to actually explain....

The underlying idea of the advice is that you only have control of a car if it is going forward and the front wheels are rolling. If the wheels are sliding, the car is just going to slide and you have no input on where. Thus, if you are driving a car and it is starting to spin and skid off the road, the right thing to do is accept that the car is going the direction it is going (at least for the moment) and turn the steering wheel so as to get the car to point so that that direction is "forward" -- ideally before the car is completely sideways. And then, once the car gets back to being under control, you can deal with controlling it to not go off the road.

This is sort of counter-intuitive if one's sliding sideways off a snowy road -- you want to get back to the middle of the road, so if the car is sliding to the right, a person might instinctively turn the wheel to the left to get back onto the road. And so then the car slides sideways off the right side of the road.

On the other hand, for a spin where the problem is the car is going the right direction but pointing the wrong way, it's actually what feels intuitive (at least to me); the car is turning clockwise and I don't want that, so turn the steering wheel to make the car turn counter-clockwise.

Or, going back to the initial phrase:

The wrong interpretation: "Steering into the skid" does not mean, when the car starts spinning or skidding, steer to make it turn in the rotational direction that it's spinning.

The right interpretation: "Steering into the skid" means, when the car starts spinning or skidding, steer to make the car point in the positional direction that it's moving.

This clarification also has me thinking about what that means as far as properly applying the advice metaphorically, but as I noted at the beginning, that is not the subject of this post!

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Also in tonight's gaming session

brooksmoses — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 07:31:34 GMT

Also in tonight's gaming session, we had an excellent example of the "fail forward" style of gamemastering.

In trying to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the evil cult that I mentioned in my previous post, we needed to acquire some red robes that the cult elders wear. We had two already, but with five of us, that was insufficient even with the proposed "I'm literally a halfling standing on the shoulders of a dwarf" plan to require only four of them.

We had determined that these are not regularly washed (it being that sort of evil cult), so that there was not a central laundry that we could infiltrate. However, they still had to be being manufactured somewhere, and since this was pretty much a self-contained cult city, it had to be somewhere in the city.

The party then started debating how to best steal some of the robes.

This debating went on rather long, so my character -- being a dwarven spy -- just went off in the brown robes of a normal cult member to steal some, taking the more severely-damaged one of the red robes we had with him. His plan was to simply walk in and say, "I was sent to return this one that's damaged beyond use, and get a replacement and three more for new recruits."

However, I then rolled a 1 -- a complete and total failure -- when trying to do this.

The gamemaster decided that what had happened was that when my character walked in, they had said the traditional greeting of "May the [Evil Monster] be with you," and he had replied with "And also with you," which was entirely the wrong response, and the elders that had also been there had sentenced him to ten lashes with the Cane of Correction for not remembering that it was supposed to be "And also with your spirit."

Before I could decide whether to accept this or attempt to run away, the "action archaeologist" monk walked in wearing the other set of red robes, and attempted to bluff her way into being the one to give the punishment. She didn't roll a 1, or even any sort of failure, and thus succeeded in doing this.

There was then a bit of scene of her character attempting to not actually hurt my character while making it look good, and my character squealing like a stuck dwarf.

So everyone else I think presumed that plan was done, but my character said in a small defeated voice, "Okay, now can I get the robes I was sent for please?" and after the rest of the players finished laughing, the monk led my dwarf by the ear back to the robe manufactury and said sternly, "Now take your replacement robes and remember the doctrine next time, heretic."

And thus we obtained the robes we needed for infiltrating the sanctum of the elders.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Well, this will end well.

brooksmoses — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 07:09:38 GMT

Our gaming session this evening ended on a bit of a cliffhanger.

At the end of the session, we had successfully infiltrated one of the deepest sanctums of the evil cult that is trying to control the evil monster that we are trying to kill before it devours the world. And we were quietly grabbing all of the important books while trying not to wake the cult elder who was asleep on the couch in the middle of it.

Then some of us noticed that this sanctum wasn't just any random giant floating gold cube in the middle of a cave -- it was a millennia-old magical flying machine.

Specifically, our "action archaeologist" character who is basically Indiana Jones if Indiana Jones were an anime Wushu monk noticed this.

She noticed this, and since she has intelligence as her dump stat [1], she immediately got very very excited and started trying to quietly get the attention of our wizard to point out the control lever to him with flailing hand gestures of excitement.

Our wizard, who has wisdom as his dump stat.

Needless to say, he cheerfully pulled the lever.

We'll find out what it does next session, but surely no serious harm will come from this, right?

[1] For non-gamers: When creating a character, one typically assigns a set total number of points among the various attributes (e.g., strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma) that determine their abilities. A character's "dump stat" is when a character has a very low value in one characteristic so as to have more points for the others, and also so that they can fail in entertaining ways.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Some really fascinatingly-alien deep-underground life.

brooksmoses — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 21:16:14 GMT

Per this article in The Guardian, scientists at the Deep Carbon Observatory have discovered some really nifty life forms deep underground.

What I find fascinating is not just that these organisms are living deep underground (where "deep" is measured in kilometers; this is well below dirt levels), but the adaptations that this low-energy environment means as far as timescales. Some of them -- and these are microbes (it's not clear if they're singlecellular or multicellular) -- live for thousands of years, barely moving. One methanogen is described as using the tiny amount of methane it can produce "[not] to reproduce or divide, but to replace or repair broken parts." The rocks move on geological timescales, and so, it appears, does the microscopic life living on them.

Other interesting datapoints are that we're only recently discovering this because of a combination of advances in deep drilling and "improvements in microscopes that allow life to be detected at increasingly minute levels". The depths where the scientists have found life are only limited by the depths of the boreholes, though they've currently not found anything that lives in places hotter than 122C.

Oh, and based on their numbers, they're estimating that this deep-subsurface biomass is about 3-4% of the total biomass on the planet. It's not just a tiny bit of stuff.

There's a bit more at "Science Daily", too.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Small things that give me happy feelings.

brooksmoses — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 20:33:35 GMT

I am visiting a dear friend this week. The morning after I got here, I was adjusting the shower water, and noticing that the knob is one of the sort that one turns about a turn and a half to get to "hot", and then turns it back some amount that's really kind of dependent on the vagaries of the particular valve to get to the right temperature. So, I made a guess as to what would be right, and turned it there.

Then I noticed that, just a little bit off from where I'd turned it, there was a small blue pointy sticker. And so I thought, "Aha, I know what this means," and turned it to that point, and indeed a moment later the water was at the perfect temperature.

This makes me very happy.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Finding interesting people on Dreamwidth

brooksmoses — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 06:58:32 GMT

So, Tumblr has ~~started taking down icons with nipples~~ ~~sold itself to the Russians~~ declared intent to start taking down photos of nipples and everything else they deem an NSFW photo or movie ("But not art! And not non-female-presenting nipples!" they say¹), and demonstrated that they're doing this with an AI that is clearly illustrating all the well-known reasons why doing this with a current-tech-level AI is problematic. It's quite the train wreck, and many fandomly people are responding by saying "we know how this story goes" and establishing community in safer places. This train wreck is also not quite the subject of this post, merely a cause for a cause of it.

What this post is actually about is, with people from Tumblr joining in droves: How does one get a Dreamwidth reading page that's full of interesting people writing interesting things? I started answering this on gallusrostromegalus's introductory post, but I figured it might be useful more widely.

I'd also like to hear other people's thoughts on the matter in comments -- this is just me tossing out some ideas for things that have worked for me, but I've had pretty narrow experience mostly from years ago, and fandom changes quickly sometimes.

Anyway, with that said, here's what I had to say in the comment:

I mostly found interesting people by commenting on other people's posts (which, unlike Tumblr, stays on their post rather than being a separate post on your page) and then following other people who made interesting comments on people's posts. That means there can be an advantage to going back and looking at older posts -- usually from the last day or so; things seem to taper off a bit after that unless a really interesting conversation starts -- to see if there are new comments. Also, if an interesting conversation starts or a post looks likely to spawn interesting conversation, you can click the "track this button" (which looks like a little bell in my default style; I'm not sure how universal that is) to get notifications when people make new comments on it.

Unlike Tumblr or Twitter, there isn't really any way to see all the comments that a specific person is making -- but you can see their "reading" page using a link like http://brooksmoses.dreamwidth.com/read (or click the "reading" link on their main journal page) to get an idea of what the people they're subscribed to post. That won't include private posts that you couldn't otherwise see, and if they use a lot of circles to have specific narrower reading pages it won't show you what those are, but it is still pretty useful in finding other interesting people.

Finally, on things I have actual experience with: I'd note that my friend jenett does weekly "salon" posts which are basically just forums for people to have conversations in the comments. The most recent one is at https://jenett.dreamwidth.org/1794110.html, to give you an idea -- and you could either join the conversation there if it looks interesting and looks like a group of people you want to join, or you and other people reading this could start your own if the idea looks useful but there's less community overlap.

On things I don't have experience with, Dreamwidth also has communities, which are essentially communal journals where multiple people can post -- those were a big thing in fandom in the LiveJournal days and I believe still are here now, but it's been a long time since I've had time to seek those out. There are also the "interests" lists in people's profiles, which become links to lists of other people with that interest listed.

[1] Yes, this proclamation on their part led to creation of at least one community where people are posting things like a photo of a naked nipple with two eyes and a very distinctive mustache inked onto the surrounding (rather large) breast to make a cheery face. Obviously.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Why is "morsepunk" not a word?

brooksmoses — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 22:05:23 GMT

I was explaining elsewhere how I had gone down a small research rabbithole and discovered that although "early 1993" is a reasonable date for the birth of the Web given that the software was made available for open royalty-free use then, the first server was actually turned on in 1990. Except that I made a typo, and said "1900" instead.

This led me to imagining circa-1900-ish web servers, which would obviously be Morsepunk, along the lines of steampunk and such. But apparently nobody else on the web has used the word yet.

So, here! Morsepunk should be a thing! We already have real-world stories of telegraph operators starting friendships and romantic relationships via Morse code, as well as the paradigm shift of how cables changed the world by making instantaneous communication a thing. Certainly there is fertile ground here, for something that uses electrons and wires and radio waves the way steampunk uses steam and clockwork.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Small child is delightful.

brooksmoses — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 07:25:33 GMT

There is a certain "things being right in the world" feeling that comes of watching our two-year-old happily pushing the Kik-Step stool across the floor to the other room, and doing the occasional half-stumble that happens when one is small and leans slightly too hard on a Kik-Step stool and it stops rolling for a moment.

(I have many emotional memories tied up in Kik-Step stools, apparently.)

Also, I'm told that once she got it into the other room, there ensued this conversation:
T: I on tep tool!
S: Yes, you're on the step stool.
T: I tall! I taller dan you!
T: I taller dan cat!
T: I taller dan Mama. Dan Mommy! Dan Papa Brooks!
S: You're really tall!
T: I taller dan Papa! And I jump on youuuuuu!

A bit before this, she'd also come into the dining room to carefully fetch the large heavy book of Christmas songs off the dining table -- it was just at the edge of her reach, and also heavy enough that it took most of her small-child concentration not to drop it -- so that she could play the game she invented of picking random pages in it and asking Suzanne to sing the song thereupon. Which, as far as Suzanne is concerned, is the best game ever.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.

Random artistic scribbles

brooksmoses — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 07:30:16 GMT

A while ago, I bought an inexpensive computer drawing tablet to use for making random computer art. It then sat next to my desk, in its box, for quite some time, as such things tend to do for me.

This week, though, I have been setting up a new-to-me computer [1] as a "creating things" workstation, and meanwhile green_knight had mentioned that Clip Studio Paint was having a 50% off sale, and more-importantly said that "this is, by far, the best application for drawing and artistic endeavours I have found." Half-off was only $25, so I bought a copy, installed it on the new computer, hooked up the tablet, and had just enough time to play with it for a few minutes before bedtime.

One of the great things about having kids is the reminder that one can enjoy doing artistic scribbles without doing Great Art or even doing anything particularly skillful, and that there's no shame in doing that. Also the reminder that, if one doesn't know what to draw, houses or stick figures or stylized animals are a good starting place.

And so I had fun, which is behind a cut tag so as not to overfill your virtual refrigerator with scribbles.

This is Bob. Bob started as a crosshatched circle, in which I learned that the stylus wants rather more pressure than I'm used to from computer input devices (and, for that matter, from many drawing implements). Bob then got a head, arms, feet, a hat, a pocket, and a necktie. And then some color.

I'm not sure if this bird is a Thrush-Bob (in ursulav's usual naming scheme) or has some other name. This was me playing with watercolor brushes and colors. One of the nice things about drawing on the computer is that watercolors don't get muddy the same way they do on paper, and overpainting and erasing work well. On the other hand, that sometimes-muddy blending is part of what makes actual watercolors get the effects they do, so at some point I expect to see how to get that behavior on the computer.

So, I had fun, and I've now stuck the "art" up on my virtual refrigerator for you to admire, as is the proper thing to do with art of this sort.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there; comments here will eventually be duplicated to there.